Doctor Who: your verdict on the new series

Doctor Who: after the series opened with episodes of such quality, the inevitable question was: 'Can they keep this up?' Photograph: James Stenson/BBC

Well that didn't take long did it? Saturday sees the airing of A Good Man Goes To War – Doctor Who's first-ever mid-season finale – and then the show disappears until autumn. So how have things been shaping up over the past seven weeks?

The series was launched amid enough hype and speculation to almost put Lady Gaga to shame – with the big sell that one of the leads was going to die. Since we'd already seen River die back on the library planet, and pictures of Amy and Rory on the pirate ship were available for anyone with a working knowledge of Google, it became pretty obvious that it was going to a version of the Doctor – and there would have to be a sci-fi get-out.

The programme's showrunner, Steven Moffat, has promised that the death is real and final, and the hoop-jumping it's going to require to resolve that has still not been revealed. But it's fair to say that the BBC is probably not going to axe its biggest hit when Matt and his bow tie decide to pop off.

Despite that, the Doctor's death was still sudden, brutal, shocking, upsetting – and just the first of many intricate plot loops that the two-part season opener had up its sleeve, along with acrobatic dialogue and game-raising performances at every turn.

Shooting on the Utah plains gave the show a cinematic feel. Canton Everett Delaware III slotted seamlessly into the extended Tardis family. And the Silence, though a riff on Moffat's now-familiar tropes, were finely executed, with Smith's line about them being the "scariest monsters ever" proving not to be completely ridiculous, when they re-ignited the too-scary-for-kids debate.

After opening episodes of such quality, there came the inevitable question of: "Can they keep this up?" To which the inevitable answer was, "of course not". Yes, the series needed to breathe after the events of 1969, but The Curse Of The Black Spot was a wasted opportunity on every level. The script was clunky, the pirates hammy and underwritten, the plot perforated and it all looked rather cheap. The internet was ablaze with speculation about how the "missing pirate" could be another "the Doctor's missing jacket" from last year, but I think in our heart of hearts we know it was just a shonky edit.

But after the blip came Neil Gaiman's The Doctor's Wife, an episode perhaps unique in attracting barely a single criticism. The simple conceit of sticking the Tardis into a woman's body was too gorgeous to be cynical about for a second, and Suranne Jones's "curiouser-and-curiouser" portrayal was revelatory. After the promise of a Tardis runaround, some were disappointed that it only amounted to the old control room and one corridor – but it was still the first Tardis corridor we've seen since 1985.

The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People two-part story we've been watching over the past couple of weeks will hardly be known as all-time classic, but it still made a credible fist of being "the ethically ambiguous one", with solid performances all round and things starting to get serious.

Threads were picked up, and others planted, that will prove crucial to the major story arc; you can read the entire story as a set-up for that final cliffhanger, where Amy was revealed as a flesh avatar – her true self stolen, heavily pregnant and about to go into birth with an eye-patch-wearing Frances Barber for a midwife.

As a whole, the show feels like a consolidation of what the new team started last year. With an established, returning cast, the series was able to plough straight into heavy story from the off, with the characters becoming more rounded and developed – Amy is less shrill, Rory less pathetic, Matt's Doctor swelling with deeper shades.

There's an argument that the entire Moffat tenure will end up being one, long story. Serialising it to such an extent (perhaps for the benefit of the American convention) could be a risk. There's a great many things in each episode that only reveal themselves on repeated viewings – but how many people will watch them more than once? What do the 'casual' viewers among you think? And has the series lived up to its promise?

On Saturday, River warns that the Doctor is going to rise higher than he's ever risen, and then fall so much further. Could there just be an awful possibility that the same might be true of the show they named after him?